YIIK: A Postmodern RPG was recently under fire after the developer claimed that their games was essentially misunderstood, which caused poor reviews to start pouring in. "My mistake was thinking that video games are art," they said, and now they've been outed for plagiarising Haruki Murakami.
Haruki Murakami plagiarism is particularly odd, considering the fact that the sole developer of YIIK cited the esteemed New Weird author as one of his primary inspirations for making the game in the first place. With that in mind, it seems that the dev forgot to cite their sources one too many times.
"She narrows her eyes and looks at the young man standing there," goes Murakami's quote. "He is so tall, she seems to be looking far overhead. Their eyes meet. The young man smiles." Taken verbatim from the novel After Dark, it was only a matter of time before someone detected the fact that lines were lifted directly, almost unchanged from the book.
"Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair," says another quote from the very same book, making it painfully obvious where the developer's inspiration was coming from. Whether this is a simple misunderstanding, and the dialogue was mistakenly not attributed to its original author remains to be seen, of course.
In any case, YIIK: A Postmodern Game contains plagiarism, so there's that.
